h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Instead, I'll be spending the weekend trying to work out why my computer won't boot, and then probably reinstalling Ubuntu. And then reinstalling my LAMP server, and then reconfiguring everything. The Aviators site will have to wait.

Bah!

TRiG.

I so hate 'puter troubles. (hug). Can you email me and tell me how to proceed with what we had planned?

, TRiG.

If you need any help Trig, just ask

I can possibly even make a virtual cup of tea if I can remember where the smilies are

If you need help design-wise I'm here.

Tav, I may well take you up on that.

For now, I'm going to get it working, but looking just as dreadful as it currently does. A redesign thereafter would be an excellent step 2! (Step 3, actually. Step 2 is improving the back end.)

TRiG.

I might, Pastey, but I think I know where I'm going for now. Unfortunately, I've let the weekend get away from me, but I'll try to do a bit more before I head back to bed.

TRiG.

please do, the only thing I can't promise is that I'll be fast with doing anything, it always depends on how quickly which task needs to be done.

Trig, quick question for you, what would you need to bring it all in house on the h2g2 servers? I'm wondering if it might be easier to have the back up of the guys at Noesis to make sure the servers are running?

After all, it's one of the things they've brought to our new h2g2

Wow, that would be marvellous. TRiG only bought the website because we couldn't host it on h2g2.

Well, the idea has always been to bring everything in-house. We're not the bbc, we can do things

Wait 'til you see what else I've been working on

>>> Wow, that would be marvellous. TRiG only bought the website because we couldn't host it on h2g2.

Fortunately, we don't have to play by silly BBC rules. We're only an email away: artists AT h2g2 DOT com

All it is is a couple of pages (they could be dropped entirely if it was bought in house), some RSS feeds (which should be changed to Atom in the upgrade) with attached files (i.e., podcasts), and ways of viewing those same files (video, audio) on the site itself (currently with a rather messy flash player I found somewhere under some sort of freeware license, but the upgrade would change to HTML5 with a Flowplayer fallback).

I'm sure you could do all that easily. I can currently use Flowplayer under the free GPL. If it was brought in-house, you might have to buy a commercial license. Or switch to something else.

When I've finished this upgrade (which I should have done by now, but haven't*), I'll send you a copy of all the code (none of which will be useful to you, I'm guessing). Ultimately, bringing it all in-house would be ideal.

TRiG.

* Computer problems yesterday, followed by sitting up all night reading, so I'm tired today. Currently in the office using my work computer. And it's time to go home, or I'll be good for nothing tomorrow.

Also, my stupid webhost won't allow me disable GPC Magic Quotes. Bah!

TRiG.

Tell me about hosting! I've lost count over the years how any sites I've built, making sure the clients know from the start what will be needed, and them assuring me that the hosting they're sorting out will be more than capable of it, only to find out they've paid through the nose for something that's next to useless.

The worst one though has to be the client, who will remain nameless but let's just say they were a rather large pharmaceutical company, insisted that the hosting they were sorting out was going to be far better than anything I could suggest for them. Turned out they'd bought a 1&1 package. One of the ones where you point and click to build your site. They'd chosen it because one of the board members sons had built a site on one of those packages, and it was so easy that it must be good.

Meant that their new product launch had to be rolled back a month. They'd paid for advert space in trade magazines and papers too, which was all wasted.

Ah well, the web is growing up As for hmtl5, there's a lovely book, well two actually, the Missing Manual one in particular is very good for things like "here's how to put video onto a page, and here's how to build the code for the controls..." type chapters, and the one I can never remember the name of, but is co-written by Remy Sharpe is very good for the more, experimental stuff.

It's a pleasure at the moment having a full set of test and live servers for h2g2, I'm currently building a full proper image library in the back end, and we'll hopefully soon have something else to show off too. Being released from the manacles of the beeb and having the users of the site running it is a blessing

Forgot to say, you might be able to disable the magic quotes at runtime, have a read here:

http://php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php

A asked my webhost about it, and they put in a custom php.ini file. That works.

Anyway, I've been working on it this evening, and made good progress. One or two more nights like this and it'll be done. I do need to look up the proper Atom definition.

TRiG.